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Essays
Implicit Personal Challenge to Find Country
Rescinding the Erstwhile Brisbane “Curfew Zone” to Regain its Lost Places: 2
Spinning vert tricks in U-topia To return nowadays to the huge Tokyo agglomeration, presently the world’s largest— which, including Yokohama, is almost the size of the whole of Northern Ireland— from nearly anywhere in China, gives the impression of having landed in Kingston, Jamaica, but a Kingston Town curiously stripped of its lyrical magic. By contrast, flying down to Sydney from Tokyo in the waking hours of a new day, you are overcome by the presence of a vast country/ continent— yet one that in demographic terms since English settlement is exclusively “a land of cities”. But from six or seven miles up that well-known and distinctive urban context is no longer. Instead, “Country” takes back its rightful place, just as might albeit the shrinking Brazilian rainforest cover if viewed from the air. Or, as when having left Japanese airspace behind, the Russian Far East, in early autumn is sharply delineated by its first frostlike sprinkling of snow, until eventually the tundra disappears beneath “invisible” and reflective whiteness. But apart from the wet season, the Australian land mass appears unchanging, an illusion reinforced by any four hour flight over from New Zealand, in other words from a much more geologically recent archipelago to the infinitely ancient land mass that is Australia. In his Sep Yama / Finding Country (a primer) of 2009, Kevin O’Brien evokes the sixties and seventies Los Angeles phenomenon of pool skating:
David B. Stewart
Pool skaters locate potential places, enter unoccupied properties, clean up abandoned pools, skate them, and then leave. Occasionally, the Land Owners happen upon these actions and either order them to leave or sign insurance indemnities. The abandoned pool represents both useless and useful space. Pool skating, as an action, temporarily welds this tension. A dialectical tension, that is. For ‘Sep Yama’ literally translates from the Meriam language (Meriam Mìr) of the eastern Torres Strait (an endangered Papuan language located in what is nowadays Australian territory), as “ground you cannot see”. A Country denied. In light of this phrase, the Utopian ideal of the archetypal Australian settlement becomes an “unattainable” ideal, tied to the Greek etymology of ‘not’ and ‘place’, ironically far from any latter-day or studio-based notion of “place making”— and that despite the best vertical tricks, to adapt pool skating lingo, of contemporary Australian architects and planners. Well, you get the idea, the grid and nowadays the high rise imposed upon Country— with its beauty, hard-scratch reality, and myths. There is nothing Australian, or even Western, about the grid. The so-called Hippodamian plan goes back two and a half millennia in Asia Minor, whilst the grids of the Indus Valley civilization (Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in present day Pakistan) possess a history roughly twice as long. The history of gridded cities in the Far East, beginning in China, is less ancient— but nonetheless venerable. Yet a grid must in both theme and tone remain an alien constraint, as well as a convenience and shortcut.
224— or was that 60,000 years? O’Brien’s contention is more modest. He merely wants to set the history of the world’s arguably most ancient culture, that of so-called Aboriginal Australia, against the bicentenary pretensions of the present day Land Owners. As with the ethos of the Angelino pool-skaters, this speaks implicitly to a dialectical tension of User-and-Owner. It is a tension worth evoking in Australasia, where the current PC trend, at least in the two former Commonwealth countries, identifies unfeelingly with an official and radically “inclusivist” multiculturalism, whether in Australia or New Zealand. In other words, overall opinion supports a general leveling and amalgamation, whether cultural or spatial— a recipe for fatal submersion of a culture that in Australia was always comparatively small in numbers, despite its continental extent and embrace. In the face of a well-known popular smugness and self-satisfaction, as well as of an equally familiar wall of British condescension, now perhaps receding, the Australian cultural elite has rarely been a group of happy campers. This remains a commonplace plight within the architectural and planning professions, even though the coloration of opinion and conventional wisdom varies strikingly between Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.
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(cont.)
To generalize, in Kevin O’Brien’s words: Australian cities currently lack leadership in the way we think about planning, building and occupying them. Sep Yama / Finding Country can fill this void, but it is the next generation that holds the real capacity for change. Hence the challenge posed in the Finding Country exhibition, which is aboriginal in both origin and trajectory.
Your Property vs. My Country Australia, then, is not 224 years old, but 60,000 years old and more. Architecture in Australia, O’Brien contends, is searching for an origin. Finding Country proposes a struggle between the traditions of aboriginal space conceived of as Country, on the one hand, and European practice, defined for want of a better text in the conventional terms of social and legal property. The original penal colony on the site of the present Brisbane CBD, a bend in the Brisbane River, was founded in 1825, and from the time of the Regulations of 1829 a curfew was variously established in Brisbane Town, later in post-planning days most often defined in terms of Boundary Street. The curfew, which militated against the Aboriginal inhabitants of the district, came and went well into times of living memory and was discriminatory— no matter the reasons put forward.
Terra Nullius / Terra Firma / Sep Yama As O’Brien describes it, the predisposing incident was the historic second Mabo vs. Queenland ruling of 1992, in which Australia’s High Court declared— essentially reversing an earlier stand— that the lands of the continent were not terra nullius at the time when 4
European settlement took place. This decision specifically concerns the rights of the Meriam people to the use of and jurisdiction over the greater part of the so-called Murray Islands in today’s Northern Queensland. But foremost it struck down the notion of Australia as terra nullius (literally, a land belonging to no one) memorialized in the early colonial surveyor’s maps of the country and to be sure also proclaimed verbally. Seeking to fix and commemorate Mabo in the language of the Meriam people, O’Brien has coined the term Sep Yama. The phrase undermines the colonial Latin as overturned by the High Court, whilst contradicting the idealist notion of a fixed ground base, terra firma, perpetrated by the colonists themselves, even as the notion has proved over time insubstantial and O’Brien doesn’t hesitate to claim illusory.
Fingering Brisbane: O’Brien’s Modest Proposal Kevin O’Brien, a descendent of the Kaurareg and Meriam peoples of the Torres Strait Islands, lives and currently practices architecture in Brisbane, Queensland. A semi-tropical city of somewhat more than a million inhabitants, Brisbane’s population growth has exceeded the national average every year since 1990 at an average rate of around 2.2% per year. A controversial estimate was recently given by the federal Treasury Secretary to the effect that the city would more than double in size to some four million in the next 40 years, expanding thus at nearly twice the rate of Sydney. Less sanguine than the secretary, O’Brien has set a contrarian intellectual and planning exercise, based on a hypothetical, toxic fat tail event, imagining the city reduced in population
by 50%— and extending a challenge to the city’s next generation of architects. His brief was to empty out a portion of the Brisbane grid. The latter was first derived as the “Moreton Bay Settlement” by a trio of colonial surveyors, including Henry Wade, in 1840—1841 to fulfill the then governor’s stipulation of a subdivision into blocks “ten chains long and one chain wide”. Land sales took place mostly in Sydney the following year. The plan was criticized almost from the outset, however, as lacking in both practical features and amenities. The contributors to the present exhibition were requested to provide their own organized set of rules “in order to Find Country”. In the aftermath of the unspecified holocaust, the scenario would comprise all too predictable looting, burning, and aggressive posturing amongst the remnant of inhabitants.
Afternova— Blank White Sheet Not As O’Brien has observed, architectural students are invariably confronted with a blank sheet of paper (or computer screen) as the medium for most any design assignment. We might well think of this as a metaphorical equivalent of the hypothetical terra nullius dating back to Australia’s earliest settlement. That is, a tabula rasa. In the event, Michael Markham’s “Afternova— Camping in the Ghost of a Star” provided a brief for the emptying and refilling of the Brisbane grid. The only information given each contributor was his enigmatic prose-poem together with a single explicit instruction: “subject to decline, empty your grid by 50%, reveal what has been found, and argue why.”
The result, this large 8m x 3m collage map of the city, has been called both an exhibit and a process— both Indigenous and non—Indigenous. As an unfinished collaborative whole, it offers an adaptive rehabilitation of sounds, smells, and “paint”, no longer blank either in acoustic, olfactory, or visual terms. Working meticulously in studio, the Irish composer Barbara Ellison has devised an original soundscape from fifty looped fragments gathered by O’Brien in Country, filtering these in divers frequency regions, likewise at the requisite 50%. Appropriate portions of the map have been immersed in eucalyptus, tea tree, and frangipani oils. These taken together have yielded the (at first, almost overpowering) native scents of Brisbane. The entire notion is a rubbing out, organic and cautiously hopeful. A Nemesis, diffused, even confused, and deliberately de-centered, to modernism’s hubristic “cold nebular cloud”— yet one foretold as a work of years, if not of centuries. To be set afire at the end of this Biennale, are we not perfectly entitled to discern here a glowing stick plucked from the burning? —— David B. Stewart Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.
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Resisting Brisbane 6
After a future cataclysmic event, the river city of Brisbane is probed on what is known and assumed about occupation. Sep Yama / Finding Country endeavours to subvert occupation by conceptually reordering and resisting colonised space. This process invites multiple interpretative responses to advance cultural ideologies with racial, social and political implications. O’Brien¹ as both director and contributor, conceives Country collectively as a “pre-settlement space” and “Country is an Aboriginal Idea. It is an Idea that binds groupings of Aboriginal people to the place of their ancestors, past, present and future. It understands that every moment of the land, sea and sky, its particles, its prospects and its prompts, enables life. It is revealed over time by camping in it and guides my way into architecture”.² In Sep Yama / Finding Country we are encouraged to reflect visions splendour and bleak of 44 diverse collaborators.
Mapping Country Contemporary Brisbane is the contested country of the traditional Yagera, Jagera, Turrbal, Ugarupul and Kurnpal peoples. Futuristic Brisbane, unlike its 21st century predecessor, is no longer the site of marginalisation and exclusion for its Indigenous occupants. In Sep Yama / Finding Country O’Brien seeks to invert the satisfied post-colonial state, where Indigenous perceptions of country have remained largely invisible, except to the informed. The inaugural exhibition³ of Sep Yama / Finding Country was a counterpoint to what is unseen, by remapping the city with 19 interventions. These forerunner propositions have now been joined by an additional 25 propositions to form a total of forty-four unrelated sub-narratives of the city.
In the final exhibit, each intervention is contained within a designated zone, identified by map coordinates and authorship. So, following coordinate logic, the designate B13 is a combination reference to vertical [A–I] and horizontal [01–36] reference points. A legend shows key planning features using different line colours.⁴ On completion, each subintervention was digitally slotted into its grid location to form the final large-scale 8m x 3m exhibition panel – the composite of an alternative subdivided city. The organising model for each endeavour was constrained by the boundaries of each grid square, with propositions terminating abruptly at each grid limit. The final assembly heightens contrasting strategies between adjoining sub-panels, while resisting existing typologies. As a consequence, the known city was reconfigured beyond recognition. When contemplating the disrupted urban state, we may ask, did the fractured city give rise to new processes of structuring urban space, or is the proposition so ideologically loaded that it’s utopian/dystopian messages detract from its political objectives? Sep Yama’s scenario brief devised by architect, Michael Markham⁵ provided no planning restrictions. O’Brien provided additional guidance to his collaborators, while they had freedom to contrive their own fragment of the city (for only half the current population⁶), they could also expropriate, obliterate or create new city allotment subdivisions However, many ignored the precondition of reducing current occupation levels by half, with some extending beyond the fifty percent limit, and others maximising reductions to 100 percent.
Carroll Go-Sam
Regardless, the speculative exercise still remains an alluring one, since it counters models of development premised on the inevitable growth of the future city. For some, the march by Australian cities towards greater urbanisation, presents a worrying trend with negative environmental consequences. Yet O’Brien’s concerns seem to be socio-political, not environmental. Nevertheless, some of his collaborators demonstrated a clear anxiety about the current state of Brisbane’s urban environment by reacting to commodification and consumption. Few however, contain questionable organising concepts, but the viewer may wonder if coherency was the objective at all. Sep Yama is so politically charged, that it is difficult to critique discordant themes equally against coherent ones. One can read such propositions in a multiple number of ways. For some, this reduced city was an isolated utopian vision, about landscape and agrarian longing. This response rejects the city, and replaces it with a search for its humanist domains and origins. By default and as a consequence of its diverse contributors, Sep Yama encapsulates pan-Indigenous and non-Indigenous notions of country. Overall, Sep Yama is also a contradictory critique about urban alienation, that links human activity with the natural world in pursuit of ideology and pan-sacred notions of Country.⁷ As an exhibit, it did not set out to explicitly to invoke traditional Indigenous concepts of Country, but nevertheless borrows linguistic etymology and cultural constructs to alter perceptions of place. It was neither distinctly Indigenous nor non-Indigenous, but co-existing or inter-cultural.
This leads to one quite obvious question, how are we to view the individual manifestos and representations of postcataclysmic country against O’Brien’s dogged pursuit of persistent Indigenous country? It is evident and perhaps problematic that some of the schemes are at odds with O’Brien’s politically charged vision, with some embarking on naïve and nostalgic representations of Indigenous urban and remote cultures.
Tracking Country Traditional ethno-geographers demonstrate extensive knowledge of land systems, geography, riverine environments according to their own systems of environmental understandings and beliefs. This knowledge is continually increased through tracking and moving through country with kin. The Sep Yama anti-city composite presents Brisbane’s aftershock as dichotomously stitched together conditions of fragmented/ united, disintegrated/integrated and disrupted/ organised states. One questions, whether, some plans have been made on the most simplistic assumptions about settlement and movement patterns. Particularly, when themes ignore major geographic and morphological features or conversely assume stasis. Despite this, it both challenges and delights the viewer’s focus of each unit and its contextual neighbours. One finds that any preconceptions of a unified city plan are destructively undermined. The observer may wonder, is this a statement about the brutality of dispossession or an unexpected consequence of the process? Memories of the decentralised ‘organic nature’ of Indigenous settlement planning arise, yet in reverse– the orthogonal grid structure is at times subverted by inconsistent revisionist utopias. 1 – Essays
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(cont.)
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Sep Yama not only infuses the city with tension (indeed, tension seems too polite a descriptive) – the reordered morphology brazenly usurps existing systems and provides new unfulfilled directions, but it all seems too difficult to conceive at first glance. Some propositions are decipherable, yet others are ambiguous, esoteric and impenetrable. While many represent hybrid arrangements of orthogonal, radial and organic city planning models, some follow typologies not recognisable of human systems of dwelling. The city and its pre existing morphology are severed, viewers are made to consider them as separate dimensions. O’Brien identified two special zoning elements in the plan, one in red designated ‘special’ (or perhaps ‘sacred’) and another in white representing ‘emptied’. Yet, both remain elusive and lack clear meaning for the viewer. They are variously applied as a planning subdivision, designated zone, key feature, political statement and lastly, as intentionally unclear. To the viewer, these special elements are second-guessed repeatedly across several schemes and some remain a persistent mystery. They contribute to the graphic aesthetic, but lack clear narrative, metaphor or symbolic significance. Nevertheless, other ‘red’ features reveal an informed and considered treatment, demonstrating a depth of knowledge about settlement patterns and express sensitivity about the human condition. They appear restrained and considered, not allowing the apocalyptic event to dominate and taint what the imagined future could be.
Rights to Country and Burning Country Rights to access and utilise country or estates by Indigenous people resided in local land holding groups, who retained religious, hunting and food-collecting rights. These smaller groups were connected to a larger system of regional organisation. Aboriginal identity stemmed from ones membership to the local group, which then extended and interconnected to the larger regional group through shared beliefs and customs.⁸ Although Sep Yama did not lay expectations upon its contributors to replicate Aboriginal systems of identity and rights, some have explored the persistence of such rights in an informed and considered manner. Conversely, some have chosen to introduce retributive and segregated regimes with controlled rights of access, memorialising Brisbane’s apartheid system that continued well into the 20th century. Other contributors embarked on a reconciled future recognising that historical injustices deserve redress. The burning of country is propositioned by one contributor and references the known practice of Aboriginal people to use fire as a tool for land management, consequentially creating floral and faunal diversity, encouraging plant propagation on tracts of country. This selective patchwork practice is exercised by those with intimate knowledge of country and the properties of fire. Exploring another dimension of burning, fire also has deep symbolic significance and is used as an “agent for human change in architecture”, through expressing “complex meanings of a cosmological and cosmogenic nature associated with ceremonial and mortuary” practices.⁹ The custodial practice of burning country are viewed by some as destructive, however, its environmental benefits are gaining scientific credence.
Finally, Sep Yama / Finding Country remains an egalitarian exercise with propositions mundane and wonderful contributing to the aesthetic luminance of the final composite. It was not a longing for an idealised, imagined place of the past, since destroyed by dispossession and trauma. It’s content reflects that land and identity systems continue to operate in politicised intercultural domains, where complex ideologies interplay.¹⁰ In many ways, Sep Yama is tangential and alien to known Indigenous constructions of country. Yet, through its imagery, projection and curatorial processes the exhibition exposes opportunities to consider prior occupation through its 44 thematic explorations. Finally, Sep Yama is a prompter to push those living in the present to remember that the city of today must be vigorously interrogated to arrive at divergent paths of inquiry. —— Carroll Go-Sam Gumbilbarra Dyirrbal, Brisbane, Australia.
¹ Kevin O’Brien is a Brisbane based architect, descended from Meriam Mer and Kaurareg peoples of the Torres Strait Islands, Queensland. ² See Carroll Go-Sam, ‘Sep Yama: “Ground you cannot see” Finding Country (a primer) – Exhibition Review’ in Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, (2010), 11, 155. ³ The first exhibition titled, ‘Sep Yama: Ground you cannot see Finding Country (a primer)’ occurred in two timeframes and two different locations. The first showing occurred at Don’t Come Gallery, Melbourne on 30 April—06 May, 2009 and second show at Sling Bar, Brisbane on 25 June, 2009. Consisting primarily of conceptual and semantic explorations of Finding Country, the exhibit included a large exhibition panel (8m x 3.0m) with 19 interventions, an exhibition catalogue, a film relay of skaters, image projections, and a series of colourful skateboards painted in traditional Meriam Mer abstract motifs. See www.findingcountry.com.au For example, red = special, blue = water, green = landscape/planting, black = built (lots), white = emptied and orange = contours.
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Michael Markham is the principal of tUG Workshop, Melbourne, Victoria and the author of ‘Afternova – Camping in the Ghost of a Star’.
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The consequence of lower density results in a reduction of built fabric, allowing the exposure of an imagined morphology and opportunity to devise an alternate typology. Yet the extreme variations in density of the reconfigured patchwork city are surprising. This makes it difficult to determine whether emphasis was placed here on the process prescribed or the significance of the state arrived at. Once arrived at the fragmentary final condition, two questions arise. Does the conceptual achievement then have any attributes worthy of implementation? And, can Sep Yama viably advance a generative framework for country by melding pan-Indigenous concepts of country and removing the existing dominate hierarchy of the city’s morphology?
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Also expressed in other related works through amorphous poetic constructs concerning architecture and place, see Architectural Review (Australia), 2009:103, 92-98.
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See Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley – The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2007:4-5.
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See Paul Memmott, Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley – The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2007:xvi.
9
Mark Moran, ‘Practising Self-Determination: Participation in Planning and Local Governance in Discrete indigenous Settlements’, pp 136-137.
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A matter 224 years ago Space terminated by categories arrived on a boat.
Camping, in this land, it was thought – ended.
Matter judged ephemeral was replaced with material assumed to be permanent. Country however was obscured.
It can reasonably be said an anxiety of permanence has haunted the Australian city ever since. The conservation of the perfunctory grids (and their contents) marking out the elementary sites of Australia’s colonies dominated the last 25 years of urban policy and thought. Little use to our contemporary urban frontier.
Policy makers anticipated, then feared, the 20th century metropolis. It did not come as Jeanneret’s annihilating point of light a RAYdiant city but instead a diffuse and cold nebular cloud.
wee Our urbanity might now be better regarded as unsighted dark matter, detectable only through pressure exerted upon the visible suburban terrain. What remains unconsidered, yet a real possibility, is that over the fleetingly extensive territory of our cities, sections of the fabric might empty according to a logic of economics. Other cities, in other places, at other times have experienced decline as catastrophe. Consider the cores of the mid 20th century American city.
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Is it inevitable that though Australian cities may continue to extend that they necessarily also grow? For at least the last 100 years, infrastructure engineers, town planners, and government treasury have managed the city’s growth. They have built up an expertise of expansion. Who can now begin thinking through the unthinkable? Architects – adept at turning into the wind.
of
time, Country is lived through camping. a matter of time, Weeks, years centuries. ——
Michael Markham tUG workshop, Melbourne, Australia.
ks, years,
centuries.
2 – Submissions
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